Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others. Few work as well as the simple Hotmail strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain all these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

Another good and probably the safest option is to invest into government securities. Government securities may offer low returns, but they are safe and can support your life style. Don’t go for stocks because investing in stocks requires a certain degree of investment acumen and financial expertise. Always play safe even if you have moderate level of understanding as to how the stock market works.
What happens when you grow so fast that you start to saturate the population. This has happened to several Facebook app developers. They experience very rapid growth, and then suddenly the growth dies. Andrew Chen has written a great blog post about this: Facebook viral marketing: When and why do apps “jump the shark?”. (Side note: I don’t believe that the equation that Andrew puts forward for simple viral growth is correct, as it assumes that the entire population will continue sending out invitations at each viral cycle. However his work on saturation of the population is very relevant for highly successful viral apps.) In case you are interested in where the term “jump the shark” came from check this out: Wikipedia: Jumping the shark.
Now that we have the model built, we can play with the variables to see what effect they have. In the spreadsheet above, go to cell B11, and change the Conversion rate for invites (conv%) to 5%. This will make the Viral Coefficient less than 1. Now look at what that did to your population growth. Instead of continuing to grow, it grows to 20 people, and then stops.

​I’ve been into home décor lately and I had to turn to Etsy to find exactly what I wanted. I ended up purchasing digital files of the artwork I wanted printed out! The seller had made a bunch of wall art, digitized, and listed it on Etsy for instant download. There are other popular digital files on Etsy as well such as monthly planners. If you’re into graphic design this could be an amazing passive income idea for you.

Here's an option that's still unfamiliar to many people but that has been growing in popularity: Lending money on a peer-to-peer basis. A major website for this is lendingclub.com, where investors have earned returns in the neighborhood of 4% or more annually. You'll be lending money to fellow individuals who have had trouble borrowing money through other avenues, and you can spread your dollars across many such folks to reduce the risk.

When you write a blog post on your website, that article immediately goes out to your followers. But the content also remains on the website for others to find via search engines or social media. Each time somebody reads your content, there’s the potential to serve them an ad, product for purchase, or affiliate link (many links in this post are affiliate links). Each set of eyeballs that read your content carry the potential for passive income.
I do agree that a few of these ideas are not bad, but for me the problem with some of these platforms has been that I’m not from the USA. So, I can’t operate there. It’s a really interesting possibility to get some extra bucks from doing what you would do either way, like shopping. One of the best projects so far that I have seen is FluzFluz. It’s simple and really easy to use for everyone who uses Uber, Amazo, or other apps. The best part of all is that you can get some passive income – not just from your own purchases, but from other people’s as well. I hope one day it will make it here to your list. I think it’s worth it to check out.
Humor: Old Spice’s viral video marketing campaign used humor to great effect. They had to. After all, there aren’t many other interesting ways to promote a deodorant / body wash. But they did it with a knowing smirk. The brand didn’t mind poking fun at itself. And it worked. The usage of humor introduced the brand to a younger, Internet-savvy audience.
All viral marketing examples — deliberate or accidental — have three things in common: the message, the messenger and the environment. Each part must be leveraged to create a successful viral marketing campaign. Viral marketing campaigns may be created by any size of business and can stand alone or be a part of a larger traditional campaign. The campaigns themselves may utilize a number of tools, such as videos, games, images, email and text messaging, free products, appealing to the emotions of users or viewers, raising awareness to a worthy cause, and making such products, ideas or media easy to consume and share. Viral marketing often relies on the help of an influencer, who has a large network of followers.
By increasing the exposure of your brand and delivering value to your audience, you have a stronger likelihood of getting the success you need in your viral marketing campaign. Awareness is required even if the content is great so that people can share and make it popular. You need to create something that pulls in the kind of attention that will spread.
Determine who your target audience is in the earliest stages of your campaign creation. To achieve this, ask questions such as: Who do I want to connect with? What content would they feel passionate about? What are their hopes, dreams, and values? Why would they care about my campaign? What will can I do to make them want to share my content with their social network?
When I purchase an existing online business, I look for cash flow over the past year and where the money comes from. I want the sources to be more passive so that it does not take a lot of my time. Also, typically I will make an offer that is 18 – 24 months of profit so that I know that I will get my money back within the next two years. I hope that helps!
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge started in 2014, which was an online effort to raise awareness for people with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) disease and to raise funds. The campaign was able to raise $115 million in a span of just eight weeks! The challenge for people was to pour a bucket of ice-cold water over their head and challenge minimum three people to do the same and make a donation to The ALS Association.
Active income, on the other hand, involves earning money in exchange for a service. It could be a salary, an hourly wage, commissions, or tips. It’s essentially a trade of your time for a fixed dollar amount. Most people choose to live this way, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as you understand that there will be a limit to how much money you can realistically earn.

Speaking of selling stuff online, that's another mostly passive way to generate income. You could generate an income stream for a while by clearing out your basement or attic and selling items on eBay or elsewhere. This can be especially effective with collections. If you have lots of games or jigsaw puzzles that are taking up space and not being used, they can be great sources of income. You might reap a lot by selling new and used clothing you don't need.

Marketers and agencies commonly consider celebrities as a good influencer with endorsement work. This conception is similar to celebrity marketing. Based on a survey, 69% of company marketing department and 74% of agencies are currently working with celebrities in the UK. The celebrity types come along with their working environment. Traditional celebrities are considered as singles, dancers, actors or models. These types of public characters are continuing to be the most commonly used by company marketers. The survey found that 4 in 10 company having worked with these traditional celebrities in the prior year. However, people these years are spending more time on social media rather than traditional media such as TV. The researchers also claim that customers are not firmly believed celebrities are effectively influential.[43][44]

My favorite type of semi-passive income was rental property because it was a tangible asset that provided reliable income. As I grew older, my interest in rental property waned because I no longer had the patience and time to deal with maintenance issues and tenants. Online real estate became more attractive, along with tax-free municipal-bond income once rates started to rise.
^ Semenov, Alexander; Alexander Nikolaev; Alexander Veremyev; Vladimir Boginski; Eduardo Pasiliao (2016). Analysis of Viral Advertisement Re-Posting Activity in Social Media. Computational Social Networks. CSoNet 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol 9795. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 9795. pp. 123–134. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-42345-6_11. ISBN 978-3-319-42344-9.
Thanks for the great article…although I have to point out many of the items listed are not passive but active, such as selling bodily fluids, writing blogs or resumes, and collecting bottles and cans. To be truly passive, the income source must require no effort on your part (after initial setup). Real estate, dividends, P2P lending…these are truly passive income sources.
Writing a book is an incredibly challenging task, and one that can take years to complete. Once the book is written and published, it doesn’t take any effort to maintain – unless you revised it down the road due to a change in your field. The risk is that no one downloads or buys your book, but there is considerable upside if you manage to find a following. There are a number of places to publish books online these days like Amazon.
Etsy now allows you to sell digital products in your store. This can be anything from a picture that someone can download and frame to a guide on how to create a budget in PDF form. The possibilities for you to be creative are endless. The nice thing is, once you create a digital product for Etsy, you upload it and you can sit back and watch the sales come in (assuming your digital product is awesome).
Teachable and Udemy are two of many, but these are the most prevalent, and they’re both intuitive and user-friendly. With Teachable, you have more control over your pricing and the look and feel of your course, but you don’t get a built-in audience. Instead you have to do all the marketing yourself. Udemy has a built-in base of students, but you don’t have as much control and they take more of your revenue.
The vast majority of my investing is in retirement accounts and won't be tapped for income until I reach at least 59.5 years old. However, I have a very small taxable investing portfolio (less than $5k) with Ally Invest where I invest in a handful of stocks that I value. I do not use the earnings as income – I simply hold these stocks. But I have an unrealized gain of $340 from this year so far.

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Inspired by you, I started a tax/personal finance a month ago. I figured if it works out, it will create a good side income for me. If not, at least I can use the blog to build my brand as a tax lawyer. Other than that, my current investment portfolio is heavily focused on index funds because of its historical performance and tax & cost efficiency. Right now my dividends income every year is about $14,000. I also have a good amount of unrealized capital gains every year from my investment, though I don’t count the capital gains as my passive income as they are paper gains, at least for now.
'The influencers in order to communicate marketing messages to the audiences you seek to reach'.[36] In business, it is indicated that people prefer interaction with humans to a logo.[37] Therefore, it seems that influencers are on behalf of a company to build up a relationship between the brand and their customers. Companies would be left behind if they neglected the trend of influencers in viral marketing, as over 60% of global brands have used influencers in marketing in 2016.[38] The influencer types come along with the level of customers' involvement in companies' marketing.[39] First, unintentional influences,[40][39] because of brand satisfaction and low involvement, their action is just to deliver a company's message to a potential user.[41] Secondly, users will become salesmen or promoters for a particular company with incentives.[40][39] For example, ICQ offered their users benefits to create the awareness of their friends. Finally, the mass reached influencers are those who have a huge range of followers on the social network. Recent trend in businesses activity is to offer incentives to individual users for re-posting the advertisement messages to their own profiles. A common type of an incentive puts all the re-posting users into a random draw for a valuable gift [42]